G. E. Moore

G. E. Moore (b. 1873–d. 1958) is credited, along with Bertrand Russell, for doing the most in the early 20th century to weaken the hold of idealism on English language philosophy and for advancing the method of analysis, which through its many permutations can be considered still to be the prevailing way of doing philosophy in English. He was also known for his tireless defense of “common sense” as a source of knowledge about the world against many different kinds of philosophical attacks against it. His making much of the fact that philosophers often make a point of criticizing our common understanding of the world without any good reason to do so makes him, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein (b. 1889–d. 1951), with whom he was in close personal and philosophical contact, a searching critic of philosophy. He did not, however, follow Wittgenstein in advocating a therapeutic philosophical approach, as he found that, despite their confusions, philosophers did raise genuine questions. Philosophers such as A. J. Ayer (b. 1919–d. 1989) found that the analytic method Moore did so much to foster revealed the genuine philosophical core of questions while eliminating their “metaphysical” dross. A much-discussed question of Moore scholarship concerns his strategy of pointing philosophers to, or even of “proving” to them, various things that, in his opinion, they know, and their denial of which he considers to send their philosophy off track. How is he proposing to proceed, given that the most salient feature of their theorizing is their resistance to the very things he would point out or prove to them? This question arises in one or another form in all the areas of his greatest contributions: ethics, where, except for a momentary wobble, he defended a robust objectivism; epistemology, where his defense of a sense data theory of perception sits uneasily with his view that we have certain knowledge of the existence of mind-independent material objects; metaphysics, where his defense of universals bolsters the act-object theory of consciousness he advocated against idealist theories; and metaphilosophy, whose issues he usually broached in discussions of more specific topics. His disarming philosophical approach to issues appears to have stemmed from his unassuming, even innocent, character, for which he was much admired. Despite being shocked by the peculiar things many philosophers said, he trusted that they would accept the truth about an issue if only it were sufficiently clarified. At times he risks tedium in the pursuit of clarity, but at other times, the clarity he achieves gives his writing an austere beauty.